Patent Document 1 discloses an apparatus and method for detecting a defect and the like on the surface of an item to be inspected, such as a semiconductor wafer. It is described in the document that (1) an inspection recipe needs to be prepared by appropriately selecting optical conditions for a dark field of view detection optical system, such as the light-blocking shape of a spatial filter and the setting condition for a polarizing element, depending on the structure of the wafer, the pattern shape, the type of defect to be detected and the like; and (2) the selection of the optical conditions by the recipe creater can be facilitated by observing a Fourier transform plane image and a wafer image simultaneously in real-time.    Patent Document 1: Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2008-116405